Jessica L. Owens

Among the zillions of fantastic monitoring companies and softwares that brands can pay to utilize, there are some free techniques that can be used by small businesses, campaigns, and for personal brand monitoring. Among my favorites is Google Reader.

Let me show you how to use Google Reader to monitor your personal brand or any other keywords you’d like to monitor.

Start by conducting several searches in Google News and Google Blogs with various different searches. I used searches like “jessica l owens, michigan” and other variations of how an employer might be searching for me, using my college, my company, and any of my known usernames.

It’s okay if there is nothing there now, if something appears in that search anytime in the future, it will appear in your reader. Click RSS and copy the URL.

Create a tag or a folder in Google Reader called “Personal Branding” or whatever type of monitoring you’re doing so that you can categorize it and easily view it and add all of your feeds to that tag.

It will look something like the image above.

If you’re not sure how to do this, find help in Google Reader.

Propel your career or business with social media

Register Today!

Learn to use social media to build a personal brand at 6:30 p.m. on Oct. 27 at Central Michigan University (location no longer in Grawn and will be announced soon).

This free seminar hosted by Social Media Club – Great Lakes Bay and CMU’s American Marketing Association will feature a panel of three well-known speakers who have successfully built brands for themselves and other companies/

Learn how to build your personal brand online

The panel will consist of Hajj Flemings, Nikki Stephan and Becks Davis. They will discuss how to build a brand using social media tools – such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs and more – and will answer your questions about personal brands. Use hashtag #smcglb to tweet about this event. 

Afterward, join us for drinks and networking at our afterglow event (location to be determined).

About the panel

Hajj Flemings (@HajjFlemings) has been featured on ESPN.com and BusinessWeek.com. He is the founder of Brand Camp University and the author of “The Brand YU Life,” which was selected as one of Fast Company Magazine 2008 Readers Choice Business Books of the year. His branded clients include Walt Disney, Ford Motor Company, Skechers Footwear and U.S. Department of Defense (Telecom Division).

Central Michigan University alumna Nikki Stephan (@EstrellaBella10)  is a public relations professional and social media strategist at Identity Marketing & Public Relations. Nikki is a member of PRSA Detroit and Social Media Club Detroit. She also leads a weekly Tweetea discussion group in metro Detroit. She’s a frequent contributor to Identity’s blog, id tags, and maintains a personal blog, Essential Elements, where she shares stories related to creativity, happiness and success. 

As the founder and editor of detroitmoxie.com, a website focused on Detroit, Becks Davis (@BecksDavis) has built and fostered a community organically using social media tools. She also is active in the Detroit digital community, working on projects such as TEDxDetroit and 140 Characters Conference Detroit.

Social Media Club – Great Lakes Bay is sponsored by:

Platinum: AGP & Associates, Inc. and Dow Chemical
Silver: Think Marketing and Design
Venue: Apple Mountain and Midland Center for the Arts
In Kind: CMU Career Services 

Interested in becoming a sponsor? E-mail SMCGreatLakes@gmail.com for information. 

The future

Creating Organizational Change to Support Social Media Integration

The Speaker: Shannon Paul

Shannon is the Social Media Manager at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and she writes about social media for business at the Very Official Blog, a blog listed in the Advertising Age Power 150.

Prior to her current role, she managed social media for PEAK6 Online, parent company of several web-based businesses in the financial services sector, and the NHL Detroit Red Wings.

Shannon has experience creating and implementing social media programs, policies and workflow systems to help businesses participate in the social web, including those in regulated industries.

The Afterglow: Apple Mountain

Stay after the seminar to network with others. There will be a cash bar at Apple Mountain

What to post?

When designing your social media strategy, a lot of companies find themselves stumped in what to post. Granted, you can promote sales, perhaps your bestselling products, or continue to talk about how awesome your company and employees are, but lets be real… nobody really cares.

Instead- post information that people want to read and that they can relate to by telling success stories of your companies or employees. Make it interesting and something that the reader could relate to or wish to share with a friend. It’s important to ask “what’s in it for the reader?” each time you post something.

How to post it

Also, it’s important to post in an easy to read format. Include charts and pictures and summarize by using lists.

However you write and present it on your site, make sure that the text that gets placed in social media is intriguing enough that the reader at least just wants to finish the sentence he or she is reading- but what the hell, they’ve already clicked through so lets keep them there for the whole article– better yet, complete a sale before they leave. Because that’s what the whole point is right? Well, that’s up to you and that’s what your strategy will determine.

Where to post it

Sync your accounts using tools like perhaps HootSuite or using the options that the social media service provides.

Make it available on all types of services such as Facebook and Twitter. Also be sure it’s available on multiple devices and utilize RSS so that no matter what the reader is utilizing (mobile, tablet, Google Reader, etc) they have the chance to find it, read it, and share it.

I was so intrigued from this article by MarketingCharts that I had to share all of the details and add my comments. It is truly a to-do list for you and I- so print, share, and bookmark this article. Even better, add this to your company’s marketing strategy and do whatever it takes to make these a reality. This is a list from your upcoming consumers.

What they want from their phone:

Guarantee secured data access to the user only (80%)

Provide accessibility to personal health records (66%)

Present opportunities to be educated anywhere in the world (66%)

Bring users closer to global issues impacting teens’ world (63%)

Are shockproof and waterproof (81%)

Have endless power (80%)

Feature a privacy screen (58%)

Are made of flexible material and fold into different shapes and sizes (39%)

Have artificial intelligence – ask it questions and it gives answers (38%)

My takeaways:

• despite the trend of posting what you do online, our future users are extremely private and will continue to be that way. They want to share only what they want to share.
• As a corporation, if you are not mobile, to them you don’t exist. Nearly half (47%) of US teens say their social life would end or be worsened without their cell phone, and nearly six in 10 (57%) credit their mobile device with improving their life.

I was reading Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin yesturday and I started to think about the future of marketing and how we interact in a time when there is more content available than ever before. Seth talks a lot about how there are more and more competitors and the need to infest the “hives” with “ideavirus” in order to be successful.
As the world comes together on the internet, content grows drastically. We’ve only been in this era for a short period of time but we are already bombarded with more information than any of our previous generations could fathom.
Many see a future where the internet connects the world and the people all become a unified “hive” as Seth would put it. But after reading about Seth’s “ideavirus” and the need to infect specific “hives,” I beg to differ. He clearly states that there is no way to infect everybody even if your product could impact everybody.
So as we enter an era with unlimited content, we have learned to aggregate content in a way that is focused to only our needs. As marketers, it is unbelievably essential to understand this. As our world starts to evolve electronically, everyone will be segmented into hives. Marketers will have more success by focusing on hives and understanding the targeted hive instead of the traditional mass media.

I’ve read articles over the past year concerning why Twitter has been more popular with adults rather than teens. If the chart above showed ages below 18, we are sure to guess the bar would be much lower. I was reading some posts by my friends who have either recently joined Twitter or who have been on Twitter for some time, all of whom don’t have any formal marketing background. I realized how differently we “tweet” and how useless I find my friends’ tweets. I scan them in just a few seconds where other “Twitter friends” or people of whom I met on Twitter, who usually have a marketing background, are much more informative about whatever it is that they’re writing.

Believe it or not, nobody really cares what you’re doing right this second, or even later tonight, especially if that activity is routine for you.

Many of my friends post on Facebook personal things like what they’re doing tonight. On Facebook, comments are allowed to be posted right to the original text. Even something that is useless could be posted and might be interesting after a few comments. It’s not easy to follow comments between users on Twitter, therefore, nobody really cares what you’re doing unless it’s something really out of the ordinary.. and in that case, you should probably include a link for more information!

To be useful/informative on Twitter, include a link.

My non-marketing friends on Twitter almost NEVER share a link. This is the #2 reason why their posts are useless. If what they say is interesting, where did they find it? Usually there is not enough characters left to say “I found this on…” but a Tinyurl would be great. A quick blurb, and here is some more information.

This is exactly why young people don’t Tweet.

Young people were raised on AIM, Facebook, then Twitter. We evolved into a different type of web user, where older Net users probably learned each application by reading articles on why this is good to use for personal (and business).  Girls on AIM posted quotes or song lyrics to their profile or away messages. Some still do this on Facebook. I’ve recently seen this on Twitter and it just doesn’t work.

Guys liked to post sports scores or funny jokes to AIM. This has evolved into Facebook in the form of different blog applications and groups like FML and Texts From Last Night. On Twitter, it sometimes works but there is no easy way to add the link. Good marketers know this. But the average Twitter user isn’t a marketer. Oh wait. Yes it is, that’s why #Twitterfail continues and non-marketers and young people have stayed away.

I think this is the world’s first virtual strike. I’m very impressed at the consistency, the message, and the explanation included in the series of 27 messages and company sites. Click the image to see for yourself… Read the article from AdAge.com to learn more.

Sometimes people ask me what type of job I’m looking for or what I want to do with my major. I try to be brief by explaining that I’d like to go into digital marketing and new media. Many people don’t really understand this and I realized that new media is vague. Quite frankly it could mean something different to anybody.

Wikipedia and Google tend to group the search “new media” and “social media” in the same results and description. Wikipedia describes new media to be digital and computerized. This new term tends to coin the image of a computer, Facebook, Twitter, SEO and SEM. If you’re like me and you’re interested in the much bigger picture of new media, you don’t necessarily think of it that way.

On a grand scale, new media could also refer to television, DVR, TiVo, and On Demand. In fact, it already is used in TV. For example, when I was helping my mother buy a new TV, we shopped for many different features. A TV with new media features that was presented to us was by LG. There were capabilities to connect the TV by wireless or via Ethernet to surf Netflix, YouTube, and more. If you don’t want to invest in a brand new TV, don’t worry, there are also reports of DVD players containing this technology.

The company’s message to the potential consumer should not continue to be interruptive of the viewer’s leisure time. The consumer should seek the product and the company and marketer should be able to deliver at the appropriate time. This is what new media will be. My goal is to become one of the hard working professionals in new media. That is, I would like to make my career efforts towards all types of ways to make marketing be what the consumers are looking for  by using behavioral targeting and marketing and by using new media in many ways.